A Church with a Bookstore at Its Center
Lehigh Valley Baptist Church stands at 4702 Colebrook Avenue in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a small Lehigh Valley borough. The congregation is an independent, conservative Baptist church. What makes it unusual, and what most people first encounter online, is not its pulpit but its bookstore. For more than four decades the church has run Book Heaven, and since 1998 it has owned Challenge Press, a small publishing house. The two merged in 2008 into a single retail and publishing operation that now ships distinctively Baptist books, Bibles, and tracts to pastors, laymen, and missionaries in places where sound teaching material is hard to find.
From a Back Table to a Worldwide Catalog
Book Heaven started in the early 1980s as a small table in the back of the church's old auditorium, set up to give members a way to buy good Christian reading. From that table it grew into a full retail store, and in 1998 the church acquired Challenge Press, which had been publishing and reprinting conservative Baptist titles. In 2008 the two were combined under the Book Heaven - Challenge Press name. Today the combined ministry publishes, reprints, and distributes more than 150 titles and stocks a much wider selection from other conservative and KJV-friendly publishers.
The store and the press still sit on the church's Colebrook Avenue property, so a walk through the front door drops a visitor into a working retail space that doubles as a small warehouse. The shelves are organized by topic, with sections for Baptist Doctrine, Baptist History, KJV Bibles, Foreign Language Bibles, Children's Bibles, Commentaries, Sermons, Biographies, Christian Living, Counseling, Family and Parenting, Children and Youth, Music, and Missions.
An Unapologetic KJV-Only Stand
The clearest identity marker across the whole operation is a commitment to the King James Bible. The store sells only KJV Bibles, and an entire section is given over to Bible Version Issues, defending the Authorized Version against modern translations. Titles like Why the King James Bible is the Perfect Word of God, Why We Hold to the King James Bible, God Wrote Only One Bible, The Modern Bible Version Hall of Shame, For the Love of the Bible, and Let's Weigh the Evidence sit next to works by David Cloud and other defenders of the Received Text tradition. The catalog's own disclaimer is careful: the store sells only KJV Bibles, but some of the books it carries quote from other versions in the course of their arguments, and the store does not endorse that practice.
The same conservative instinct shows up in the rest of the inventory. The About page is explicit: Book Heaven-Challenge Press is committed to bringing the best conservative, Christian, KJV materials that it can. The fact that any item is for sale, however, does not mean a blanket endorsement of the entire contents, other works by the same author, or other materials by the same publisher.
Books That Name the Church's Theology
Although the catalog covers the wide range of subjects a general Christian bookstore would carry, several clusters of titles show where the church's sympathies lie. A Baptist Doctrine section includes The Case for Independent Baptist Churches, Baptist Confession of Faith for the 21st Century, Baptist Doctrine in One Year, Studies in the New Testament Church, The Independence of the Local Church, The Myth of the Universal, Invisible Church Theory Exploded, Four Front Doors to New Testament Churches, and Elder Rule...In a Baptist Church?. The store also stocks works defending ecclesiastical separation, the premillennial return of Christ, eternal security, believer's baptism, and the historic Baptist succession often called the Trail of Blood.
The Baptist History section leans on a ten-volume Baptist Heroes of the Faith series, J.T. Christian's classic two-volume A History of the Baptists, the Trail of Blood lecture series, and biographies of men like John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes, Shubal Stearns, John Leland, and William Carey. The American History section adds titles like Sergeant York, Baptist Patriots and the American Revolution, and What Hath God Wrought!.
The Counseling section is heavily shaped by the nouthetic, Bible-based model associated with Jay Adams, with titles like Competent to Counsel, Biblical Counseling: Conquering Sin, How People Change, and a long row of short booklets on anger, worry, forgiveness, depression, grief, and domestic abuse. Pastoral leadership titles include J. Oswald Sanders' Spiritual Leadership, Charles Spurgeon's Lectures to My Students, and The Art of Pastoring.
Children, Youth, and Family Resources
The Children and Youth section is built around the Patch the Pirate audio adventures, the Time Twisters series, the Jotham's Journey Advent trilogy, and a deep selection of KJV children's Bibles, baby New Testaments, and read-aloud storybooks. Family and parenting titles include Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, Don't Make Me Count to Three, Honey for a Child's Heart, Bringing Children to Salvation, and a series on the duties of parents. The store also stocks vocal and instrumental CDs, including Sacred Keyboard Meditations, Come Thou Fount, and the long Patch the Pirate children's music catalog, plus hymnals, octavos, and piano sheet music for churches that still sing from books.
Serving Missionaries and Pastors Worldwide
The reason the church has bothered to build a publishing house and a worldwide mail-order operation is captured in a single sentence from the About page: the store exists to serve pastors, laymen, and missionaries around the world who do not otherwise have access to these resources. Many of the international orders ship to fields where doctrinal Baptists are few and printed material in their own language is scarce. The Foreign Language Bibles section offers Spanish, Chinese, Czech, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian editions, and the Foreign Languages catalog includes tracts and books in Spanish (Alien Baptism and the Baptists, The Trail of Blood, Why Be A Baptist?), Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian.
The Missions section itself is built around resources for church planters and cross-cultural workers: Biblical Missions, The Pattern of Church Planting, Ministering Cross-Culturally, Peace Child, Through Gates of Splendor, and biographies of Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor, and William Carey. A short book called The Story of Nam Khao Baptist Church points to a specific overseas partner congregation, and the Spanish-language Serving as Senders (Sirviendo al Enviar Obreros) speaks to the supporting churches back home.
Tracts for Personal Evangelism
Beyond the bound books, Book Heaven produces a tract line under the Challenge Press imprint. Individual tracts cost about a dollar apiece and include the Good Person Test, Can You Find the Cow?, Which Road?, Is Jesus a Fraud?, The New Birth, and the Mickey Mantle tract. They are packaged in bundles for use at outreaches, door-knocking campaigns, and vacation Bible schools. The store also sells full evangelism programs, including A Living Manger Program for Christmas, and the sermon outline tool Scripture Diagram Graphics - Drawing Men to Christ.
Browsing and Buying
The store's main phone number is (610) 967-4005, with a toll-free line at (800) 893-9586. Orders, account questions, and customer service all route through bhcp@lvbaptist.org, a reminder that the operation is owned by the church rather than a separate nonprofit. The store accepts most major credit cards, American Express, Discover, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay, and online orders can be placed at any hour through the Shopify-powered catalog at baptist-books.com.
Anyone who wants to browse in person is welcome, but the store asks that weekday visitors call ahead at 610-965-4700 so someone can be available to help. There is no set retail schedule; hours are tied to when staff are on the property. The store is part of the church's Colebrook Avenue campus, and the church itself is a short drive from the center of Emmaus and from the larger Lehigh Valley towns of Allentown and Bethlehem.
For those who want to follow the ministry online, the Book Heaven - Challenge Press Facebook page carries announcements and new product notices, and the church keeps a presence on Twitter and Instagram under the handle @lvbaptist. The main church website is at lvbaptist.org.